North Carolina is becoming an outstanding beer state, and Craft breweries are really starting to flourish from Western NC to Eastern NC. North Carolina is growing strong with about 75 statewide — it’s actually hard to keep an up-to-date count with new breweries constantly on the horizon.

Here at Mother Earth we travel all over the South to promote good, handmade craft beer, but in April of 2013, we are dedicating it all to the state where we live, work, and play! This April, we will celebrate North Carolina beer culture with festivals, beer weeks, collaborative brews, guest taps, and even some handmade Beer B Que sauce made by the brewers of Mother Earth.

The Mother Earth Beer B Que Sauce was a creation from the brewers at Mother Earth and consists of many different ingredients. The Beer B Que Sauce contains wort from our Sisters of the Moon IPA during the brewing process. (Wort is the liquid extracted during the mashing process during the brewing of beer. Wort contains the sugars that will be fermented by the brewing yeast to become alcohol.) The Beer B Que Sauce is Eastern North Carolina style vinegar and pepper based sauce that is “Dry Hopped” with cascade hops and finished off with a bit of Mother Earth’s award winning Dark Cloud Lager. Dry hopping is a technique used to get an intense burst of hop aroma in hop forward styles such as American IPA's or pale ales, so we decided; why not do that in our Beer B Que Sauce. Look for a sweet and peppery sensation up front in the taste followed by a small amount of heat and hop taste in the finish.

Mother Earth Brewing was founded by Stephen Hill and Trent Mooring in 2008. Soon after, they added Brewmaster, Josh D. Brewer to the team and within months, an old downtown building was repurposed into a brewery. Mother Earth Brewing began to bottle and keg their beer in October of 2009. Today, just over three and half years after production of their first batch of beer, Mother Earth Brewing counts on a team of fifteen people to keep up with production. Mother Earth Brewing enjoys over 2,500 accounts, and can be found in bars, restaurants, supermarkets and specialty stores across North Carolina, Georgia, and Washington, DC. Mother Earth Brewing is the first Gold L.E.E.D. ® certified production brewery in the United States. More information can be found at www.motherearthbrewing.com. For more information about LEED®, please visit www.usgbc.org/leed.